I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.
Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.
they also ruined their own platform by creating and encouraging an entire business around gaming search results.
15+ years ago you could search for an error code, or an error message, or a part number and actually find it.
Yandex is better than any American service by far imo.
Yandex LLC is a Russian technology company that
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Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo in like 2019 and used that for a long time until Kagi came out and now I use that and I’m quite happy with it.
I still include Google results in my Searx.
Definitely miss the good ol’ days where it was optimized to give the best results. Same goes for Netflix recommendations back in the the DVD mailer days…
Been using Ecosia for up to a year now probably. I like it and I don’t need anything else.
Is Ecosia any good for the privacy-minded folks among us?
It’s more privacy focussed than Google, but less than others. Personally I use Ecosia at work and Qwant at home.
For a growing number of users, we can provide search results and ads from Google. For the eligible users, we will provide Google results by default. When your search results and ads are provided by Google, Google will use essential cookies and local storage to help defend against fraudulent traffic. Beyond this, the cookies Google uses will depend on where you are searching from: If you search from the EU, UK or certain US states (for example California), Google will not set additional cookies without your consent. If you search from elsewhere, Google may place additional cookies and the functionality of these cookies will depend on whether you have a Google account
Seems like using Ecosia is about as private as using Google directly.
Google’s been garbage for years now, I kind of miss Coppernic Pro which is what I used before Google it searched all the search engines available and combined and resorted all the results.
If you’re tech savvy, look into selfhosting SearXNG.
I think there are public instances as well.
Would it run on a Raspberry pi 5?
Yeah it doesn’t use many resources.
I’m running one on pi5 with no issue. It takes less than 5 minutes to install one under docker.
No effing way! I got a 16gb model, doing this right………now.
Everybody is using ai of course.
Nice to see this choice is making an actual difference.
Who knew if your product was mostly shit people would stop using it?
77% still using it though
This might be very non-linear, like ice breaking under your feet.
Sure, but this is a process that takes time; that said, he trend is downward and that will likely continue unless things improve.
The recent duckduckgo ad campaign will surely help rescue googlers and so does my mission to ensure everyone I know doesn’t use google search.
Fair point, but I refer you to my previous comment with the addendum that, unless things improve, Google results are increasingly likely to be removed from other services/features as time progresses.
And if tech people are no longer recommending it, or actively recommending against it, it is possible to get people to start switching. This is largely how chrome became so popular in the first place, and that required getting people to change from the default option.
!lemmysilver
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Didn’t read the article but use Qwant since Trump.
Or Ecosia
I’m glad to contribute to that metric.
These numbers underline the current trend to choose European services instead of American ones, which followed the trend to deGoogle.
[the chart shows stats for American Google, American Bing, Russian Yandex, American Yahoo!, American DuckDuckGo, and Other]
the thing is we need hard forks of chrome and firefox, or alternative browser, ladybird is funded by shopify, so i dont think it would good in the end,
the discussion is about search engines, not browsers.
What would be a good EU alternative?
Qwant or Ecosia.
Thanks!
Yeah, that statement wasn’t supported by the data at all. It seemed to only be included as a way to link to their other articles about European alternatives and de-Googling.
Russian Yandex
Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.
Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.
Who still uses search engines to find torrent, though?
Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.
Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn’t find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.
It’s been common ever since magnet links were created, since you can post a magnet link anywhere (even in a plain text file) rather than having to upload a .torrent file somewhere like in the old days.
Thanks for mentioning Yandex, bringing is back onto my radar.
And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
I’m not using their products now as I don’t want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.
I work in an education setting and in the last month, Google started preloading the contents of other sites directly on the search page. It is wreaking havoc when combined with our blocking tools because kids will do a Google search for something innocuous and the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something else we have blocked.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
If you have to stick with google, you can use udm=14. https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ You can set it as default search provider.
This is available in the UI too - there’s a tab labeled “Web”. Sometimes it’s hiding under “More”.
Adding it to the search provider URL is a good idea though.
Thanks for the tip
Amazing, thank you!
Does that work in Firefox? Seems like I don’t have the ability to edit the address.
Yeah, even on mobile you can do it.
time to switch to Qwant, ecosia, or duckduckgo
Google search has sucked for a couple years now. DuckDuckGo is better for everything except maps.
That’s been my go to since they started. There is/was a challenge using them when we evaluated them a while back with forcing safe search reliability if I recall the reason.
Thats because for some ungodly reason they use Apple Maps. Not sure why they dont integrat with an OpenStreetMaps like service. At least that way users can start contributing to fill the gaps
Mapy is also a great European alternative, based on OpenStreetMaps
the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something
Does that mean any search (AI insight notwithstanding) will get blocked if it includes a Reddit, Coursera or something on the blocklist result at all?
Because if yes, that’s much more than just asinine. It’s basically blocking entire search topics due to the sheer fact that Reddit will appear on the furst page of Google a lot.
That is exactly what is happening. They type in the search query on their Chromebook (for example, “why do dry erase markers float”, the results page flashes for a second and then the “this page is blocked” screen comes up saying they were blocked from Reddit, et al. Without them clicking on any search results.
And 2 kids can do the exact same search at the same time and get blocked for different sites or only one will get blocked.
Somewhat OT but why do you block coursera?
We have a different person that manages our block list so I don’t know the reason for all the blocks. That said, we block https://www.coursehero.com/ not https://www.coursera.org/
Oh I thought it was a typo. I have no idea what coursehero is.
I will say coursera is awesome for their calculus classes. (Or they were like 10+ years ago anyway.) Which caught me up after a long hiatus from college when I returned to finish.
To be fair, I don’t know that we don’t block coursera as well but the block I specifically saw was for a course hero. And some of the blocks that we have on are for security reasons over reliability reasons. We have to be hyper cautious about the students leaking any potentially PHI and some of the Google sign in setups are less secure than others.
